


Halloween

by fatcatwrites



Series: vampire/ghost au [1]
Category: Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, It's hard to maintain relationships when you're both dead, Post-Slash, Pre-Slash, Resurrection, They're sort of on a break??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:02:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2543519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatcatwrites/pseuds/fatcatwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>vampire!thor, ghost!loki</p>
<p>this is part of a series. just read the tags please i have no idea how to summarize except 'resurrection'. that's all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halloween

There is little in Thor’s long, long life that remains unchanged. As the world around him grows and shifts and evolves, Thor adapts. His clothes reflect the time period he lives in, his home is torn down and rebuilt with newer amenities, and he travels from place to place, city to city, basking in glowing gas lamps, yellow electric bulbs, bright fluorescent signs.

 

Time passes. Years, decades, centuries, bleeding together into one amorphous shape, punctuated regularly with one bright, shining, point; every October, on the last day of the month, Thor gets to see his brother.

 

—

 

It goes like this; he goes to his family tomb after he feeds, an hour before midnight, and waits for that tell-tale chime of the clock tower.

 

It’s actually rather anticlimactic. One moment he’s sitting alone surrounded by the remains of his family, and the next Loki’s there, perched cross-legged on top of their father’s grave.

 

Even in death, Loki’s eyes are bright and sharp; the years of afterlife have not dulled the child-like innocence Thor remembers.

 

—

 

(He’d been too young; Thor visits in no small part due to guilt. He faces his brother and endures this yearly penance, and dreads the day when he stops feeling that sharp, piercing ache in his chest at the sight of Loki whole.)

 

—

 

“What have you brought for me this time?” Loki asks. His eyes flicker over Thor’s frame and the walls of the mausoleum, trying to discern where his gifts are.

 

Loki always had been an eager, greedy child, and Thor has no desire to change anything about his brother anymore. 

 

Loki is as Loki does, and if he’d just _listened_ —

 

There is no point, as they say, crying over spilt milk.

 

“Something different,” Thor hesitates. He’s not entirely sure how well-received his offer will be, and he cannot, in all honesty, say his reasons are anything other than selfish. “I can bring you back. Not to life, exactly, but you’ll have a body. You can leave this place.”

 

_With me_ goes unspoken, but Thor thinks Loki hears it anyways.

 

His brother tilts his head, curious and bird-like in his movements, and says simply, “Why?”

 

_Because I miss you._

 

“I would have you by my side again.” 

 

It’s the truth. Not the whole of it, granted, but a truth nonetheless. Thor grows wary of Loki’s ever-shifting, increasingly volatile moods. 

 

Something about being stuck in a ghostly limbo is driving his brother mad. Loki had always been unpredictable and sharp, but in recent years the mischief has bled from his eyes to be replaced with something darker, something fearful.

 

Loki examines him closely, eyes narrowed in an expression much too shrewd for his youthful appearance, lips thin and pursed and curled downwards in bitter displeasure.

 

That is not the answer he’s looking for.

 

(Thor wonders, faintly, when Loki learnt to _see_ people like that, and how he’d never noticed.)

 

“You would have me _beneath_ you again,” Loki hisses, and it is cruel, spiteful, filled with a malice that Thor is growing more accustomed to with each passing year.

 

It is this same bitterness that drives Thor to the lengths he has gone.

 

“Do you not miss it, then? The wind through your hair and the stars dotting the sky.” Perhaps it is underhanded of Thor, to tempt his brother so — but truly, he is desperate. He will not allow this madness to sink any deeper. “Does the rest of the year pass so quickly for you, when you cannot be seen or heard or felt?”

 

Here Loki falters; the briefest flicker of doubt in his eyes, and his demeanour changes once again to something meek and not a little bit sullen.

 

Stubborn, defiant, as most youths his age are. Were. 

 

“Maybe,” Loki mutters, but it is more of an afterthought than anything.

 

Thor sighs, in sadness and in relief, as he starts arranging the items he brought.

 

—

 

“Is it going to hurt,” Loki asks, some time later as Thor is lighting the candles. He looks nervous, as if he is having second thoughts. 

 

“I don’t know,” Thor replies, because he _doesn’t,_ and he’s only ever lied to Loki once.

 

“Are you even sure this is going to work?” Loki presses, because it is in his nature to do so, and it’s boring work watching Thor shuffle around the small space placing strange looking objects and drawing odd-looking runes onto every available flat surface.

 

“It will work,” Thor answers with a surety he does not entirely feel. _It has to work_.

 

—

 

Finally, Thor places the bare bones of his brother onto the small, makeshift altar he’s created. The skeleton is carefully, lovingly, cleaned of dust and dirt and other foul things that would taint his brother’s skin, and the off-white remains gleam in hundreds of candles’ dim glow.

 

The time has come, and though Thor’s body is no longer capable of pumping adrenaline through his veins, Thor shakes with nervousness all the same.

 

One deep, unnecessary yet effective calming breath later, Thor begins in earnest.

 

—

The ritual lasts until sunrise. One by one the candles gutter out, but the light of their flame is transferred onto the altar before him, until the whole shrine is drenched in unbearable _heat_ , and a golden shroud covers everything that Thor holds dear in this world.

 

It is a wonder that Thor doesn’t burn; it feels as if his skin should be peeling off at any moment, that his hair and his clothes should singe and burn like the brittle things they are.

 

But Thor’s concentration is absolute, and the light grows brighter even as the sun rises and saps his strength.

 

The last thing Thor sees before his body gives out is a pale, familiar, bone-white hand reaching for him.

 

—

 

Thor wakes, and he is resting on a stone slab staring up at a carved, vaulted ceiling.

 

And then he feels hands combing through his hair, and smells damp earth and moonlight, and knows he is home.

**Author's Note:**

> hello. i love comments. i live and breathe for comments. if you're not sure whether or not to leave a comment, _please do_.
> 
> Also does anyone know how the word count thing works? The number always seems to go down when I copy and paste from my original text, but none of the words actually appear to be missing. Eugh.
> 
> [x-posted to tumblr](http://fatcatfishdish.tumblr.com/post/101436934244/title-halloween-fandom-thor-pairing-loki-thor)


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